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Mozi posted:Your point being.... culture and the arts are better under state repression? My point being that it's a silly argument. "If you like restaurants and the opera then you should support the social democratic redistribution of wealth" is so spurious it's going to take away credibility from any good arguments you're making. Violent and chaotic periods of history and authoritarian cultural norms or repressive governments have coincided with lots of high culture and fancy living.
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Jan 20, 2017 00:11
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asdf32 posted:Part of what needs to be pointed out is that dissatisfaction and actual disfunction can be completely different things. There are many issues where the negative views of voters are essentially factually inaccurate - on crime, healthcare, immigration and all sorts of economic specifics. Absolutely. Water fluoridation, for instance, often gets voted down in cases where it's put to referendum instead of simply being implemented as a technocratic decision by local government. We could list examples of that all day. Or we could reach into the past and find some quintessential examples of democratic bodies reaching horrifically terrible decisions over and above the warnings of the relevant experts. Democracy and popular decision making aren't magical solutions to intractable or age-old political problems. My criticisms of the current establishment or status quo or whatever want to call it are a lot more grounded in the specific situation we find ourselves in. Broadly speaking I think our society is failing by it's own self stated standards I could point to a lot of specific failures, but for the sake of brevity let's point at three major areas where our elites have made promises they couldn't keep, or have visibly displayed their own venality and incompetence: foreign policy (especially in the middle east), the economy the environment. It hardly needs to be said that big chunks of voters are implicated alongside their leaders in all of those problems but I think that something you fail to acknowledge is the way that elite interests shape the way in which our society discusses and even conceptualizes its problems. I think you really underrate the extent to which voting and politics is diverted into particular kinds of choice or dilemmas. There are times when competitive elections or referendums are going to yield real and important real world consequences for voters, so it can't be said they have no power over their own fates, but the options they choose between are heavily constrained. In many cases viable alternative options which might be expected to work better than the options permitted by the system are simply excluded, not because of technical difficulties but because they are contrary to some vested interest. The reason that I accused you of being tautological is because you seem to present a vision of democracy where just because voters get to make some limited choices, therefore they are fully in control and thus by definition whatever the government does or does not provide is based on what the voters want. This perspective overlooks the way the system operates in reality. quote:In regards to the study I have a few comments. First, significant chunks of it can be explained. Black voters are such a sure thing for democrats that democrats have zero incentive to pay attention to them. Second, as you pointed out voter sentiment can be conflicting which poses a chalenge for that study which tries to get relatively specific. Third its obviously true to an extent. Part of it will never go away - there will always be inequality in power which will give some groups an advantage. But also it probably captures the real anger we just saw in this election where the white working class openly broke with the elites they had long partnered with (but who had always ignored them). In one paragraph you describe how blacks overwhelmingly vote democratic out of fear, despite receiving very little in return, and then two paragraphs later you say that since the US doesn't have single payer healthcare, therefore it doesn't want single payer healthcare. That's where I see the tautology coming in. You start from the premise that voters in the system get what they want, then reason backwards from the fact that there's no single payer system and conclude that therefore single payer is unwanted. What you're ignoring is the extent to which voters are corralled into a couple false choices. You speak of "what power looks like a Democracy", but this framing is far too abstract to be very useful. The United States has extremely uncompetitive elections. Senate incumbency rates are high and house incumbency rates are approaching North Korean levels. A lot of that is a direct byproduct of gerrymandering or voter suppression. quote:How exactly have you incorporated the trump win into your worldview? Your whole post would seem a lot better if we currently had president elect Bush, coming off a win where he outspent everyone, planning 4 years of elite prescribed neoliberal policy including immigration reform and the TPP instead of trump tweeting about trade wars and the wall while intervening in the market at the level of individual factories to save working class jobs. I never doubted that Trump could win the election and said on many occasions leading up to the vote that there was a very real chance of him winning, and while I did think based on poll projections that Hilary was much more likely to win (apparently even Trump's advisers thought this) I wasn't shocked when those predictions turned out to be wrong. It makes sense to me that Trump won. I guess I need to restate this but I don't think elites or monied interests are omnipotent within the confines of the system. I guess you could make a very rough analogy to a horse and a rider, just because the rider has trained the horse to do what it's expected to do 99% of the time doesn't mean the horse will never bite or kick, especially when it's being severely mistreated. But again I feel like you're swapping in a very abstract argument to cover up a fairly obvious truth about money distorting the political system. You start by correctly pointing out that sometimes even the most powerful or well funded political endeavors can fail. This is true. But from this it doesn't follow that therefore money is not a major force in politics or therefore elites don't exercise a stranglehold over political choices. The fact money doesn't win 100% of the time isn't a particularly compelling argument if it wins 90% of the time. We can quibble over how successful money is at driving political outcomes and to what extent surges of popular discontent can over ride money. Finally, I think you're conceiving my argument about money driving the system in extremely narrow terms. It's not just about election spending. It's also about the way certain ideological solutions are given a lot of support while other options are ignored or denigrated. When Trump runs on his expertise as a businessman and his tough no-nonsense approach to governance he is benefiting from decades of political preparation by the right. Shifting the conscious of the population away from social democracy and toward free market capitalism has been a long-term goal of the right. They haven't been entirely successful but I think it would be foolish to deny that billions of dollars spread over many decades and taking numerous forms of advocacy accross every conceivable medium can't be entirely ignored. Obviously it's not the only or even the main factor in shaping the political consciousness of the electorate but it can't be ignored that private wealth and power gives elite actors the ability to shape the opinions and beliefs of the populace. Now you could argue with some fairness that voters are just plain stupid if they allow themselves to be bamboozled by that. I think you'd be overlooking the subtly of a lot of this propaganda but maybe you'd still have a point. Even if there isn't anything resembling equality in terms of who controls the media or educational institutions, people still have to make up their own minds at the end of the day. But I would say even if we accept this somewhat cynical view of our fellow citizens, we're still better off trying to construct a political system where privately funded think tanks or highly biased financial reporters are presented to the public as experts or voices of reason. I think that without intolerably compromising liberal freedoms we can never eliminate this problem entirely but it could be made much better than the way things currently are. There are such massive conflicts of interest in terms of how public discourse is conducted under the current system. quote:I was personally slow to recognize the general importance of race in the last few decades but this election, as well as Brexit, was a wakeup call. Race explains the marriage between the white working class and the republican elite that we just saw break down. That the marriage roughly coincided with globalization goes a significant way to explaining the decline of labor and the general shift right around that time. Race may single-handedly explain why America is unique in not wanting to hand out wellfare or healthcare, something on display as we watch Europe recoil just at the thought of increased migrants. I feel that you acknowledge this without really considering how much it harms your argument that American voters basically get the outcomes they want. The way racial strife distorts political outcomes isn't some minor technical glitch, it's a central reality of American political life. Those kinds of stark social divisions are extremely damaging to the proper functioning of a democracy. quote:Your regan paragraph makes sense but then you take things too far. Representative democracy isn't supposed to represent what the people want on an immediate basis but it does present real boundaries for what the people in power can do before they're punished. Of course the Democrats and Republicans routinely trade the various offices but the Tea Party and Trump are also examples of how it still really does work in multiple dimensions. I guess my argument could be summarized as this. The particular form of representative democracy that is operated right now is very clearly working below its potential. I think you consistently stick to a really abstracted view of things where you just sort of chalk up any dysfunction to a "compromise" or fall back on a circular argument about the system delivering the results people want.
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Jan 20, 2017 00:12
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Comparative advantage is -- at best -- a cute little thought puzzle to introduce you to how economists think. It's the econ101 equivalent of those philosophy brain teasers that get slung around in undergrad, such as "how do we know the sun will rise tomorrow" or "if Mary spends her whole life in a totally colourless room but learns everything scientific there is to know about the biology and physics of colour, then what if anything does she learn the first time she sees a red apple?" Among many other issues, comparative advantage reduces all forms of commercial and industrial activity to the extreme abstraction of labour hours and simply asks which country produces more of a good in a single hour of work. The theory gives no acknowledgement to how different industries or forms of economic activity have significant externalities associated with them. Of course in practice there are some key differences between the economic and social structures of a country that specializes in exporting high-tech manufactured goods vs. a country that exports raw materials or agriculture. By the logic of comparative advantage it was a mistake for the United States to pursue the industrial policies that developed America into the manufacturing hub of the world because clearly they would have been better off remaining an agrarian republic that traded with Europe for most of it's finished goods.
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Jan 22, 2017 01:08
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Even the 1980s Republicans were willing to throw a shitload of people in jail after the Savings and Loan debacle. It's absolutely true that people had unreasonable expectations of Obama (which his campaign team cultivated assiduously) but a lot of his behaviour in office had nothing to do with political philosophy and everything to do with the sheer corruption of contemporary US politics. Republican or Democrat, there was no excuse to put Rubinite economists in charge of fixing the crisis that was largely caused by Rubinite economists, especially when one of your prominent campaign statements was "we can't put the same people in charge and expect different results!" Also regardless of the vague homilies he wrote to centrism and bipartisanship in his biography, he made very specific criticisms of NAFTA (laughable as it sounds, he actually had a campaign plank about renogiating NAFTA, which I doubt anyone took seriously but which ought to illustrate his dishonesty on this front), and criticisms of the free trade deal with South Korea, which he then used as the model for the Trans Pacific Partnership. He also specifically campaigned against Hilary in the primary by opposing the individual mandate for health insurance. And let's not forget that he used his vote against the Iraq war to present himself as an anti-war candidate. Yes, people had unreasonable expectations. But that doesn't exonerate Obama or mean he wasn't extremely dishonest about how he would govern.
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Jan 28, 2017 19:27
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BrandorKP posted:I got almost exactly what I wanted at the time voting for him. Except I just cited several really prominent examples of his very obviously lying?
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Jan 28, 2017 21:01
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Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. How Christian of him.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:05
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Saying you're opposed to a trade deal and then passing it, and further using it as the direct blue print for an even bigger trade deal that you aggressively try to ram through Congress, to the point that it actually contributes to your worst political nightmare happening in the form of Donald Trump getting elected, isn't some kind of noble pragmatic sacrifice. Campaigning on the need for new economic policies and then very actively protecting Wall Street -- to an even greater degree than previous Republican administrations -- wasn't pragmatic, it was ideological. It's just a real reach to pretend that the ideology at play has anything to do with Christ rather than Mammon. Obama was a very typical Chicago machine politician who talked out both sides of his mouth. And if he gave you exactly what you wanted well, congratulation, cause now you get Trump.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:25
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That's what is so frustrating about Obama. The Bush administration fully revealed just how empty the ideals of "pragmatic" centrism had become. The Iraq War and the financial crisis were the symptoms of an extremely damaged and unstable political system that was in desperate need of repair. We desperately needed some kind of new vision from the left or at least the liberal side of the spectrum eight years ago when it could have done some good. But Obama doubled down on a failed ideology at exactly the moment that it's failures had been plainly revealed and we're all going to pay the price for that now.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:37
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:I don’t think he or anyone else realized the GOP was radicalized right under their noses. Both Clinton and Jeb! campaigned on courting Bush and HW Bush Republicans. Too bad that wasn’t the makeup of the party. They saw their repeated failures on the national level (with McCain and Romney) as an excuse to slide further right. The Koch brothers came in and astroturfed the poo poo out of the movement, Fox News was there with completely unhinged hosts who had no idea what kind of damage they were doing (Glenn Beck running around calling for some kind of national unity), and the senators/congressmen in Washington were selling their voters a kind of fiction where shutting down the government and repealing Obamacare were feasible without burning bridges. "Radicalized right under their noses"? The GOP in the 1990s wasn't much better than today and George W. Bush is easily one of the worst president's in the country's history. But truth is I wasn't even thinking of Obama's completely unrealistic expectations about the Republicans. Though since you bring it up let's not forget how Obama was stil completely delusional about the GOP at the end of his first term. Obama's big mistake wasn't that he failed to anticipate Republican obstructionism, it's that he genuinely believed in the whole third way Democrat ideology in a way I think very few other politicians in either party did. And even worse, he didn't just believe in it in an ethical sense, as in he liked compromise and he thought the senate was a worthwhile institution. No, he believed that these policies were actually efficacious in the real world. He actually thought his economic policies and foreign policies were going to improve things. And his dumbshit liberal fans believed this as well, long after reality had stopped providing even the thinnest evidence to support that belief. Neoliberalism and Neoconservative, the two guiding ideological tendencies of the last 30 to 40 years, had clearly failed by 2008. They didn't fail because of Republican obstructionism, they failed because they had very little connection to reality. Having an economy dominated by finance and trying to establish liberal regimes in places that have no desire for them went just as poorly as the Soviet Union's attempts to reconstruct human nature and build paradise on earth. The only reason America's crash hasn't been as dramatic as the USSR's is because America is a much wealthier and stronger country to begin with, but as time goes by both countries seem to resemble each other more and more. Corrupt leaders, listless and demoralized populations, and a dangerous tendency to believe too much of your own propaganda.
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Jan 29, 2017 01:04
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:These two terms mean completely different things contextually and don't work in the way you're using them at all. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Thatcher, Jinping and Nieto are all neoliberal politicians of some form or other. Neoconservativism is entirely compatible with, and arguably a product of neoliberalism. You've misunderstood what I was saying. When I say neoliberalism and neoconservatism have been the guiding ideological tendencies of the last 40 years I don't in any sense mean to imply that they are in competition with each other. There's effectively one ideology governing Washington, and it manifests economically as neoliberalism and in foreign policy as neoconservatism. A more apt criticism of what I said might be that I'm using a very loose definition of "neoconservatism" to describe the foreign policy establishment in Washington, approximately the same thing that Ben Rhodes derisively referred to as "the blob". Technically neoconservatism is a very specific ideology that only a handful of people in Washington openly espouse, it's just that de facto the country seems to behave as if everyone who matters is a neocon most of the time.
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Jan 29, 2017 10:07
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asdf32 posted:It did work. Globally it was responsible for a billion Chinese people being significantly better off. For first world workers the consensus is that trade is probably a wash at worst. That's absolutely not the consensus, there's a growing recognition that the damage done by trade was been hugely underestimated (or more accurately ignored). You're being incredibly reductive here, squeezing about ten thousand different global trends and developments into one big process and acting like it's all a package deal when in fact there's a wide range of approaches for how a country handles increasing economic integration. As always your argument relies on moving things to an extreme level of abstraction and then making unsupported claims that whatever you believe is backed up by some unspecified expert consensus.
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Jan 30, 2017 21:20
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Mozi posted:No, the big picture view is meaningful and the numbers are very clear. Your nitpicking is myopic. I'm not denying that many millions of people have risen out of absolute poverty. The statistics there are unambiguous. We know that in absolute terms people are getting more calories of food, more dollars of payment, consuming a larger basket of goods, etc. I would point out that the sustainability of this situation is questionable given the incredible strain we're putting on the planet's environment, and given that the current global economy has no effective mechanisms for regulating carbon emissions. But to be clear I am in no way denying that there have been improvements across many metrics. My point of contention here is whether it makes any sense to bundle all these improvements into one giant process that gets called "globalization" or whether there are actually numerous semi-independent processes at work here. asdf32 is trying to attribute the success of, for instance, China, in pulling large numbers of people out of poverty to a "liberal model" but this is a really sketchy statement to be making, and at bare minimum it ought to be accompanied with supporting evidence. To use a really extreme example: let's say I'm scratching a lottery ticket just as Beethoven's Fifth starts playing. I win a million dollars. It would be really stupid of me to just assume that because the two events were correlated in time, therefore I won the lottery "because I was listening to Beethoven!" I could even produce a graph over time showing how my income growth spiked at just the moment I was listening to the song. Just look at these before and after numbers, they can't lie! I went my whole life without listening to Beethoven and never earned more than $80,000 in a year. Five minutes after I put on Beethoven I was raking in a $1,000,000 jackpot! This reductive tendency to pretend every economic policy, model and idea of the last forty years is somehow magically vindicated by the fact a bunch of countries -- many of which violated the key rules outlined by neoliberal economists and governance organizations -- increased their income per capita, is propaganda, not reasoned argument. To properly frame an argument like that you need to go into way more specific detail.
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Jan 30, 2017 23:14
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Arguably it's even more telling if you look at "second world", i.e. ex-communist, countries. This is a bit simplistic but if we're talking big picture then compare Russia and China. Both former Marxist-Leninist states (technically China still is one I guess), both had some impressive early growth thanks to their command economies, followed by stagnation and over reach due to bad leadership, both started experimenting with serious reforms in the 1980s. Russia liberalized much more fully, actually abolished its command economy and opened itself up to "liberal" reforms. When the cost of those reforms started to hit home the Russian parliament objected and Russian president Yeltsin basically overthrew the elected parliament in a coup which was enthusiastically backed by the United States. Under American guidance and pressure the Russian government basically turned into a hyper-capitalist oligarchy over night while life expectancy plummeted and tens of millions of people lost benefits. The US happily encouraged a few oligarchs gobbling up all the former state owned enterprises since it's much easier to deal with a few oligarchs. Like Russia the Chinese government faced unrest. They ruthlessly crushed it and then proceeded to implement reforms on their own terms while retaining many elements of a command economy. To this day China may have liberalized in many ways and it's not in any way a traditional Marxist-Leninist state, but it also isn't anything like the kind of system that supposedly vindicates the liberal model of development. Yet somehow the example of Russia being almost destroyed as a country while China flourished by telling the US to gently caress off with its "advice" gets completely ignored. And then people act incredulous when foreign countries treat American discourse on human rights, democracy and free markets as nothing more than self-interested rhetoric disguising the foreign policy goals of the US government. (None of this is to say the Chinese economy is doing swimmingly or that they don't have their own huge problems to deal with! But since they're getting treated as one of the poster children for the success of "globalization" it's interesting to compare their story thus far with that of Russia). It's really sad because a few decades ago there were seemingly some true believers in the need for liberal reforms, including democratization. But after watching what happens to countries that democratize -- i.e. they get turned into American colonies -- many people decide they'd prefer to be governed by a local strongman. Which is maybe part of the reason that when the US looks for rebels against dictatorial regimes they end up allying with the scumbag drug runners, criminal mafiosos and worst of all crazy fundamentalist jihadis. Any chance for restructuring the world along more stable and sustainable lines got thrown away by idiot American liberals celebrating the "end of history" and deciding they could go ahead and loot as much of the rest of the world as possible. And now with the United States looking shabbier and shabbier to the rest of the world neoliberal apologists have gotten so desperate they've started trying to defend their broken ideology by claiming they are somehow responsible for lifting the Chinese out of poverty while downplaying the damage they did to their own countries, and completely ignoring the fact that they fanned the flames of political extremism in America and deserve the lions share of the blame for getting a wave of demagogues elected who now threaten to undo the rest of their precious political project. Wrap it up neolibailures
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Jan 30, 2017 23:53
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asdf32 posted:There is no question that China owes a large chunk of its success to the 'liberal' post WWII global order and specifically the first world's willingness to invest so heavily in global manufacturing which is the result of their own liberal political policy of the period. No one is going to deny that China benefited from it's trade relationships with the west but we're talking about whether this vindicates liberalism. Because China benefitted precisely because it did not reciprocate. China's success certainly vindicates the concept of trade, something humans have been doing in various forms for more than 10,000 years. The fact two large regions of the world which barely interacted economically began to exchange goods, resulting in one of those regions becoming substantially wealthier, is not a surprising or counter intuitive response. Nothing about liberalism is particularly useful in explaining these results. But if you actually look at the details of how this interaction has played out then the record for liberalism looks a lot worse since the Chinese were able to open themselves to trade without actually transitioning into a liberal society, which is what everyone was predicting would happen. And meanwhile the supposed benefits to western consumers came at the cost of massive social dislocation, which produced a backlash, which now threatens to overthrow the whole system, assuming that the unsustainable environmental costs we're running up don't get to us first. China doesn't just "use some protectionist polic[ies]", it's got a fundamentally illiberal system which has been consciously engineered to exploit western trade policies, something the United States overlooked for domestic political reasons (i.e. crushing labour was preferable to maintaining a sustainable balance of trade). And the result has been socially catastrophic, to the point that now guys like Trump are winning elections or leading polls everywhere. It's contemptible watching free trade advocates continuously move the goal posts. A policy that was sold as enriching the countries that enacted it is now being re-framed as an act of charity by the west (which just coincidentally enriches certain domestic interest groups while screwing off overs).
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Jan 31, 2017 19:30
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Those statements are easily reconciled by reading them as "China did well compared to Russia because it didn't liberalize as fast, but it could have done better by liberalizing even slower or not at all." Nah, I've never suggested that "China is worse off because they have adopted capitalist/market practice." Quite the opposite, as I said upthread, I think China's development obviously wouldn't have proceeded at the same pace without access to foreign capital and markets. My point is that China's development hardly vindicates neoliberal economic theories given how much China diverges from their commendations. Russia followed a lot of those suggestions much more closely and suffered for it.
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Feb 1, 2017 06:51
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I was just replying to shrike82's post, but the first part of my post is pretty much what you just said. Russia followed the suggestions to the letter (liberalizing their economy so quickly that it collapsed into an oligarchy), while China took a more measured pace which allowed them to take advantage of foreign capital and markets without the disruption. I mean, you say it yourself; what gave China a boost was access to foreign capital and markets, not their politics - even if they had to adopt them to a limited degree to unlock that access. I just wouldn't go so far as to say that China would have been better off not liberalizing itself at all. Just the fact that China reoriented it's economic strategy around exports was a pretty big and comparatively "liberal" break from Mao's development strategy. Ardennes posted:It is both about the speed of the reforms and the sort of "end state." In the case of China, it is very clear the pace of reforms have slowed and more or less the country has reached an equilibrium state. I am actually doubtful they are going to get rid of most of the SOEs at this point, at best they cut their employment a little through buy-outs. Well, at the risk of being dangerously simplistic: I think there's a case to be made that for late-developing countries -- especially in regions that have acted as economic colonies on the periphery of the world trading system -- a coercive planned economy may be the fastest route at a certain stage of industrialization, but that at at a later stage of development opening up more space for private investment and initiative is necessary to avoid stagnation.
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Feb 1, 2017 18:21
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asdf32 posted:Bold: Really? One word first: scale. The extent to which china opened itself to foreign investment and let its economic capacity be redirected towards foreign export is by foreign entities is 'liberalism' in that regard. It's historically notable in scale and sharply contrasts with how they (and much of the world) was previously operating (hence why the world 'liberal' exists to begin with, even though yes, words like trade and freedom have been around a while). None-sense. The one-child policy is about as anti-liberal a policy as you could possibly have and it was implemented at the same time that China was opening itself up to greater foreign investment and trade. Again, you're just making bald assertions here and not supplementing them with any actual evidence. Liberalism was supposed to be a package deal. If you can selectively pick and choose a few of its policies while ignoring others (like relaxing capital controls, democratizing politics, etc) to the extent that China does and then actually outcompete more liberal economies that hewed closely to the Washington consensus then the result cannot be cited as some great vindication of liberal policy. quote:The U.S. economically absolutely benefited in terms of GDP and purchasing power (there is no way we'd have the same access to all the consumer goods that are currently made in china) and the extent to which certain demographics were hurt by trade directly, versus automation or other trends is highly debatable. No, it's not ambiguous whether the rustbelt was hit hard by the way globalization was implemented in the United States. quote:Contemptible would be the first world kicking out the ladder behind them with trade barriers in a self-defeating attempt to prevent wealth from leaving their borders with with support from certain wings of the left who selectively use examples of the developing world they don't give a poo poo about to make ideological points. If globalization had been implemented in the way it was sold -- with wealth redistribution mitigating the painful economic restructuring triggered by changing trade patterns -- then this backlash wouldn't be threatening the world economy right now. Unfortunately these globalizing policies were intentionally implemented in such a way as to crush the labour movement and win domestic political battles, which triggered a massive expansion in corporate power and skyrocketing economic inequality. This pathetic attempt to retrospectively justify the breaking of the social compact between labour and capital by appealing to the welfare of Chinese workers is disingenuous and just emphasises how much liberalism failed in its own self-stated goals of improving everyone's living standards. If your ideology hadn't willing allowed itself to be conscripted into a domestic battle between labour and capital then it wouldn't have discredited itself in this way and it wouldn't have prompted such a vicious backlash. It's pathetic that you're now trying to redirect blame elsewhere.
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Feb 4, 2017 21:19
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The other thing that globalization shills can't quite account for is how sustainable the growth of third world incomes will turn out to be in the face of climate change. If the first world architects of the current global order had put half the energy into establishing universal environmental regulations that they've put into trying to secure investor rights then we might not be stumbling into a civilization threatening catastrophe right now. But Liberalism has gotten so atrophied and weak that all its advocates can do is retrospectively pretend that the last 40 years aren't a failed experiment but rather a noble exercise in humanitarian charity on behalf of Chinese peasants.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:28
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On the subject of healthcare spending this graph is relevant to some of the arguments this thread was having weeks back: It could also be taken as a very rough measure of how absurdly choked up the current US economy is by parasitical special interests that use lobbying and monopoly power to redirect income to their own coffers regardless of outcomes.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:58
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asdf32 posted:The Marxist labor-capital framing is an antiquated and an ever more absurd over-simplification in a world currently dominated by populist movements dismantling many of the things you blame the elites for not providing. That's not some exclusively Marxist framing that is literally how mainstream economists look at GDP growth. There's a section of income that constitutes returns to labour and another that constitutes returns to capital. Discussing these different returns and how larger patterns like industrial relations or trade impact the returns to capital vs returns to labour is completetly standard and mainstream. Honestly, when you make replies like this it's so unintentionally revealing I can't help but cringe. Look, here's the results of a thirty second google search showing the Economist and the Financial Times using the exact same "labour-capital framing" that you apparently think is the exclusive domain of Marxist ideologues. You are free (and indeed welcome) to disagree with anything I've said by presenting contrasting information or by offering an alternative interpretation of whatever facts I've cited. But you're seemingly incapable of that. All you can do is (incorrectly) diagnos that since you don't agree with what I'm saying my ideas must be antiquated and old because surely nothing you believe could be wrong, never mind that you can't be bothered to marshal any specific arguments to defend your views. This discussion might be worth continuing if you at least offered interesting counter arguments but at this point you're literally just making (failed) appeals to authority. quote:Disingenuous is a leftist downplaying what that chart means to workers. Moving wealth from rich countries to poor countries across the globe is one of the most fundamentally difficult things to make happen. Liberalism was advertised as being able to do it and delivered. Peace is also difficult and liberalism brought competing powers into a single global framework that delivered peace without mutually assured destruction. If you think the environment is bad now watch what happens to climate change collaboration if this framework weakens. Honestly, why even bother typing up a reply if you're not including any actual arguments? You've made this assertin that China massively liberalized itself multiple times and even when I point out that this isn't accurate -- the one child policy being a really prominent example of a completely illiberal policy, the crackdown on Tianamen Square being another obvious one, the extremely tight regulation of capital markets and suppression of workers being a third. If you're going to actually argue China is a vindication of liberalism then cite the examples you want to use and defend those examples with some kind of actual argument. You just keep posting the same raw assertions again and again as though repeating the same trite none-sense enough times will somehow score you debate points, even though the substantive content of everyone one of your posts is the same, i.e. zero. quote:The last gasp of someone trying to downplay the economic development of peasants they don't care about : cite the environment as if economic growth of the first world middle class doesn't come with similar environmental consequences. But that's exactly the point I was making, which was apparently lost on you in your rush to type up this dumb ad hominem reply. The growth model you're defending is premised on infinite growth and has shown no capability to course correct even in the face of a species-threatening environmental crisis.
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Feb 7, 2017 21:45
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asdf32 posted:Yeah this is getting ridiculous as you transparently repeat the thing you criticize me for like not making an argument and posting the same raw assertions. I'm burned out after you prodded me to explain myself at length, with plenty of examples, and you couldn't be bothered to type up an even cursory response. You constantly demand extensive explanations for arguments you disagree with but they never seem to make any difference. And I don't mean that in some selfish "oh why can't you see my brilliance and be instantly convinced by what I argue!" kind of way. But I mean I can type out any number of contrary examples or even cite academic studies and they make literally no change in your posting, you don't even change your arguments to respond to new evidence. You plod along making the exact same arguments as though nothing had ever happened. So if you want to walk away from this concluding I'm really guilty of what I'm accusing you of doing I think there's probably literally nothing I could say to change your mind. quote:That 'capital' and 'labor' are categories that can be measured and are words that other people use doesn't make your framing of 'battle between labour and capital' useful. Which is of course the language I was referring to and, I will just repeat it because you didn't make an argument, a vast oversimplification given the actual realities of current events. The Tea Party wasn't either one. See this is exhibit A. You obviously didn't even bother to click on those hyper links. The subtitle of the Economist article I linked literally reads "All around the world, labour is losing out to capital". Framing labour and capital as in competition with each other for a limited pool of income is a completely standard and widely used framework. The financial times article I linked to is even more explicit here, with the author writing early in the article: " In the perpetual struggle between labour and capital, it is no secret which side has the upper hand. The share of the national income that goes to wages has been in decline in the developed world since the 1980s, and precipitously so over the past 15 years." The idea of a conflict between labour and capital, which is reflected in elections, industrial actions like strikes, protests etc. is a widely used, intuitive and self evidently useful way of understanding how income gets distributed. The fact you cannot even read the term "labour vs capital" without thinking it must be some kind of obscure "Marxist" ideology that you're instantly convinced no one respectable would ever use just dispalys how totally out of touch you apparently are. quote:Nor did I say china 'massively liberalized' when I said china liberalized to 'varying degrees' elsewhere which shows up as better labor rights or for example introduction of some democratic elections at the local level. I'd also argue that economic empowerment forces the government to be more accountable and more responsive that it otherwise would be (or was pre-reform). Ok. So to be clear your example of China's great liberal reforms are free elections and strong worker safety provisions? Really? quote:It's not premised on infinite growth (literally a myth). Citing climate change just highlights the emptiness or naivete of where you stand. Global trade is the main leverage encouraging countries to cooperate to the extent they currently are (imagine china and the US without it). In theory a less globalized world can only replace that with pure good will (good luck with that) but back in real life the right wing forces lining up to actually replace the existing liberal global order are openly hostile to environmental issues and most everything else that you [actually both of us] support as well. Again, what you're seemingly missing here is nothing I've said has ever implied that the greater flow of goods and services between countries is bad or needs to be starkly reversed. What you insist on ignoring is the relationship between large political investors (the so called "monied interests") and political outcomes, especially in the West. That is the barrier to taking action on climate change. It happens to be the case that this relationship between money and political outcomes can't be neatly separated from the specific way "globalization" has been implemented. These monied interests also play a direct and continual role in preventing the kind of wealth redistribution that you seem to agree would be the logical and least destructive way of replying to the growing backlash we're seeing in the west. Critiquing this relationship or suggesting fundamental reforms need to be undertaken doesn't mean advocating for the abolition of international trade. It certainly does mean implementing policies that would re-balance the way international trade and finance are conducted: in particular, targeting the numerous policies that are designed not to facilitate trade but rather to favour particular domestic interest groups.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:36
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Oakland Martini posted:Speaking of NAFTA, the poorest households actually benefit the most from NAFTA and other free trade agreements with poorer countries because they disproportionately consume cheap, imported goods. Consequently, protectionist trade policies, e.g. Trump's border adjustment tax proposal, hurt poor families the most. This completely ignores the larger political economic differences between the first thirty or forty years of post-war history vs. the contemporary "globalized" period since the 1980s. Contemporary globalization creates a situation where labour exercises less political influence at the national level, and where national governments in general are generally restrained from implementing the kinds of social democratic and pro-labour policies that helped maintain labour's share of income growth between the 1950s and 1980s. Globalization may have brought cheaper imports but it also fundamentally changes the political balance forces within each country and this in turn influences how income is distributed.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:45
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Feb 15, 2017 22:43
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This is an awful lot of work to put into arguing somebody whose opening salvo was the bizarre statement that "socialism is not a theoretical framework".
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Feb 26, 2017 20:14
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caps on caps on caps posted:Well after arguing about it two pages, it seems pretty obvious that socialism is not a theoretical framework? Apparently the only possibly working plan you guys have is a planned economy, with market socialism being not viable. But that's something we can technically not do in a way that is not terrible. You do not appear to have a firm grasp of what you're trying to say. In one paragraph you claim socialism has no "theoretical framework" and then in another paragraph you're implicitly acknowledging that it does but are complaining that no one here is actually citing the relevant theory. And when you say "theoretical framework" it's clear you're not actually talking about theory since I'm certain that you're at least dimly aware of such concepts as dialectical materialism, class, exploitation, the labour theory of value, etc. So you're not really saying socialism lacks a "theoretical framework" in the sense of some kind of overarching paradigm that structures socialist analysis. Instead you're clearly saying that "socialist theory does not provide a comprehensive blueprint for the future socialist society and is thus merely a faith based utopian creed". There's a whole other debate to be had regarding that statement but I find it funny that you're so poor at articulating yourself. Had you taken the very minimal amount of time to frame the question you were asking properly you probably would have gotten better replies. Then, after performing the rhetorical equivalent of taking a poo poo in your own hand and triumphantly wiping it all over your face, you proudly declare victory since nobody has sufficiently engaged you on an argument that you're seeming too dumb to even express properly. Helsing fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 17:57
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It's hard to frame a proper discussion when you're too ignorant to frame your question properly and too insecure to recognize or acknowledge your mistakes when called out on them.
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Feb 27, 2017 21:19
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Panama Red posted:As I'm doing some work on the history of neoliberal economics, I'm wondering why there hasn't been a greater movement back toward the "embedded liberalism" of the 1950s and 1960s. It seems to me that what ended the post-war economic boom was the contradiction between having a fixed exchange rate, no capital controls and autonomous domestic economic policies (the impossible trinity) because free-flowing capital flows meant there was too much pressure to appreciate or depreciate national currencies. Is there any traction in the advocacy of economists like Dani Rodrik to basically bring back embedded liberalism but with capital controls? It seems to me the last several major economic crises showed us that unregulated capital movement is a recipe for disaster, and in the case of the underdeveloped countries, who never benefited from the Golden Age of Capitalism (save for a few export-oriented economies, as long as the advanced capitalist nations didn't flood their products with cheap overproduced goods), capital controls would DEFINITELY be in their interest (just look at China). Does it just come down to neoliberal economics still being the prevailing economic school of thought of the day? How many more stats on missed development goals and rising global inequality do we need for that to change? Or is there something more profoundly wrong with embedded liberalism than an ideological bias against it? To answer this question you have to focus less on the economic theories used to justify embedded liberalism or the turn to neoliberalism, and focus on the historical context in which the system developed and then was abandoned. The Depression and the War created a specific set of institutional arrangements, and a particular coalition of voters, interest groups and politicians to defend and expand that set of arrangements. That isn't to say that changes in economic thinking or measurements of economic performance are irrelevant, but economic paradigms rise and fall to a large degree based upon how useful they are to the constellation of interest groups who compete for economic and political resources within society. When you actually get into the gritty policy details of neoliberalism you quickly see that one of the primary concerns of early neoliberals was the need to dismantle the link between these "special interests" and the elected governments that were catering to them. These early neoliberals believed that the New Deal and the political constituencies that defended it had created a dynamic of constantly expanding government. Interest groups - labour unions, African Americans, women, etc. - elected politicians who rewarded them with generous government handouts which in turn ensured the re-election of those politicians. This arrangement was supported with high taxes which business found burdensome. Even worse, as these special interests flexed their political muscles their ambitions grew. Big business was particularly alarmed from the 1970s onward when new interest groups like environmentalists started successfully lobbying for more government action on pollution and related issues, leading to the creation of new regulatory agencies like the EPA. They were also concerned about the growing militancy of labour unions. And in a broader sense, the establishment was coming to fear that the nature of the embedded liberal state itself was responsible for a growing radical left sentiment in the media and society at large. Hard as it is to imagine now, by the 1970s there was an increasing sense of alarm at the way Vietnam protesters and a critical media were attacking not only government but also corporate America. So early neoliberals were reacting, on the one hand, to the expansion of the government, the increase in taxes and regulations, and the general militancy of "special interests" like labour, and on the other hand they were also responding to a general economic malaise. And this set of shared interests helped transform corporate America into a special interest of its own. While there has always been extensive lobbying of the government by corporations, an important development of the 1970s was that corporate America came to perceive itself as facing a series of collective challenges. Corporations began to shift away from individual lobbying toward collective lobbying, channeled through think tanks and political action committees and Chambers of commerce. This created a new set of special interests. These special interests had a lot to gain from rolling back government support for unions, curbing government regulation, and privatizing potentially profitable government activity. There were a series of political battles which eventually resulted in the defeat and scattering of the interest groups supporting neoliberalism. We might add that there was also a significant racial backlash in America which turned a lot of people against the government as well, but describing that in proper detail would be a whole other post. The upshot is that embedded liberalism fell in large part because the coalition behind it splintered and lot power. And neoliberalism rose, and continues to dominate the policy making landscape, because it retains the support of politically powerful interest groups in society. It happens to be the case that while these battles between special interests were occurring there was also a major paradigm shift in economic thinking. The breakdown of the Philips curve in the face of stagflation, the growing fixation on microfoundations, etc. Some of these changes probably would have happened anyway. But the key here is that the people like Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek were able to influence economics to such a large degree because there were now special interest groups, like corporations, who benefitted from their message and who were willing to spend big money to support the spread of that message. Hayek had been toiling in relative obscurity every since the Second World War but his ideas only became truly influential after a political constituency for them had formed. To bring this back to your initial question; one of the primary reasons that neoliberalism maintains such a powerful hold on policy even today is that it continues to benefit a lot of powerful interest groups. Meanwhile, the traditional institutional supports of embedded liberalism are weak, scattered and lacking in confidence. So if you want to understand what drives economic policy you need to focus less on the intellectual theories and more on the question of what concrete and institutional support various theories have. It's not enough to craft a convincing or empirically rigorous economic theory. The theories that succeed in transforming society always have some interest group backing them, and they tend to have some historical rupture in the status quo that they take advantage of. In the case of neoliberalism we've had several ruptures where an alternative paradigm theoretically could have taken hold. And indeed, there have been some changes in economic thinking since 2008. But fundamentally things haven't changed much because unlike in the 1970s there hasn't been a sufficiently powerful coalition of interest groups waiting in the wings. The remnants of the old coalition supporting embedded liberalism have been too weak or too demoralized to overthrow neoliberalism.
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Mar 1, 2017 20:48
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Paradoxish posted:Manufacturing isn't "coming back" because it never actually went anywhere. We produce twice as much now as we did in the 70s with one third of the labor. A manufacturing boom would create a few tens of thousands of jobs at most, which is literally a drop in the bucket compared to the number of jobs the US economy produces every month. Even if all of those were high paying jobs, it wouldn't move actual wage growth one bit. quote:Don’t blame the robots! An interview on manufacturing, automation, and globalization with Susan Houseman.
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Mar 3, 2017 21:01
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caps on caps on caps posted:So why not a social market democracy?  caps on is back with his unique definition of "theory".
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Mar 3, 2017 21:19
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Paradoxish posted:I'm not sure the data really backs up her conclusion entirely. This is manufacturing output vs. employment in the US, both indexed against 1997 since it's the cutoff that Houseman uses in this interview: This was addressed in the interview. The increase in output is attributable to the rapid development of the electronics industry, especially computers, and the fact their processing speed keeps increasing every year. The rest of the manufacturing sector has performed quite poorly and at best is keeping pace with the rest of the economy, or at worst lagging behind it in productivity growth. quote:Moreover, the employment metric here is thousands of persons, so that straight line is actually a gradual decline once population growth is taken into account. No it isn't. Manufacturing employment was relatively stable for decades and then suddenly makes a dramatic plummet around the year 2000. quote:Without doing more research I'm willing to take the computer industry growth aspect of what she's saying at face value for 2000 and beyond, but it's pretty clear there's more going on here in general. The decline of manufacturing has knock on effects on the larger economy, both in the regions where factories closed and in the decline of a relatively high wage and unionized sector of the economy, or the way that outsourcing had a demoralizing effect on labour militancy and thus a depressing effect on wages. Obviously there are other factors at play here and this is only one part of a larger story but the idea that there wasn't a huge disruption in the manufacturing industry, which was directly tied in to the opening up of new labour markets in places like China, is ridiculous.
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Mar 3, 2017 23:33
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Paradoxish posted:What? I specifically responded to this in my post. Here: Output is only about 8% higher than it was in 1997 and in fact about 5% lower than before the Great Recession. That's not a "massive increase". quote:Yes, I also acknowledged this in my post. My point is that the civilian labor force literally doubled between the early 60s and 2000, yet manufacturing employment was flat in absolute terms over that same period. Yeah and then it made an unprecedented and dramatic drop since 2000 after remaining stable for decades. Between 1997 and 2008 manufacturing employment declined by 22%. quote:I never said any of this, so I don't know why you're responding to my post as if I did. Manufacturing was a rapidly diminishing part of the employment picture in the US long before 2000, and that apparently precipitous drop over the last 16 years actually doesn't represent a huge number of jobs compared to the wider labor market. In your previous post you claimed there was no real decline in manufacturing and that at most the job losses due to trade amounted to the equivalent of a few months worth of job creation. This is strange given that the US trade deficit increased dramatically in the last two decades.   In 2016 the US trade deficit was about $500 billion. That's down from a peak of more than $700 billion in the mid 2000s. A substantial part of those imports are manufactured goods: Industry Week, Why the Trade Deficit in Manufactured Goods Matters posted:While the United States has been running a trade deficit in manufacturing for more than three decades, it grew considerably worse after 2000. Do you really think the US could produce hundreds of billions of additional dollars worth of manufactured goods without a substantial increase in employment?
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Mar 4, 2017 20:16
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Paradoxish posted:I'm not trying to be a dick, but it seriously feels like you're not reading my posts. The "massive increase" in my post is referring to before 1997, which I brought up specifically to show that this isn't some new phenomenon. And there's still the issue that we're talking about an 8% increase in output alongside a large drop in employment. You're not being a dick. It's easy to talk past each other in these internet arguments.I do think your phrasing was a bit less clear than you realize. When you wrote that "the massive increase in output coupled with flat employment began long before the time period she's talking about here" you seemed to be suggesting that this "massive increase" then continued through the period we are discussing. I understand now that this is not your position so my apologies for misinterpreting you. quote:Your argument that manufacturing employment was stable makes no sense when combined with your argument that an 8% increase in output represents a decline. You seem to be saying that it's a decline in real terms since consumption increased over that period, but if that's the case then manufacturing employment has actually been declining steadily since the 70s (at least). A roughly equal number of people being employed in manufacturing over a period where the labor force literally doubled represents a massive decline in the relative importance of manufacturing to the labor market as a whole. I think the point of contention here is that the decline hasn't been steady at all. Manufacturing employment was stable in absolute terms despite declining as a share of the economy until 2000 and then suddenly makes a historically unprecedented nose dive. The point here is that while automation obviously plays a significant long term role in the decline of manufacturing as a share of GDP it doesn't explain the dramatic drop that occured during the last 17 years. quote:FRED is really a lot better for this kind of data, since you can overlay series against each other: But there is evidence showing that the trade deficit was impacting unemployment. We can actually see companies closing factories in the US and moving them to Mexico or Asia during this period. We can go to the towns where manufacturing jobs disappeared and cratered entire local economies. The idea that it's a complete coincidence that the trade deficit increased and manufacturing employment both fell in unprecedented and dramatic ways during the same period is hard to sustain when you actually examine what was going on in the economy during that period. quote:No, but I never made this claim either. The problem is that this isn't a simple case of suggesting that we can open US factories and use them to start meeting demand for goods. That demand is largely for cheap goods, and manufacturing (even at its peak in the 90s) represents a small part of the labor force as a whole. We aren't going to suddenly start employing so many people in factories that aggregate wages will shoot through the roof because we simply do not need that many high paid factory workers. So do you agree or disagree that the US could produce hundreds of billions of additional dollars worth of manufactured goods without a substantial increase in employment? Or are you maintaining that in the absence of trade with China that Americans just wouldn't have consumed the $526 billion worth of manufactured goods that they imported between 2002 and 2011? I just want to circle back to your initial claim that I was responding to, which was that the trade deficit in manufactured goods was the equivalent of a few months worth of job creation. During the George W. Bush administration (if we exclude 2002 and 2008) average job creation per month was 130,000. You really think that if the US trade deficit was 1% to 2% of GDP instead of 5% to 6% of GDP that this would have only created a couple hundred thousand extra jobs? Because that sounds like a gigantic leap of logic. This isn't to say that you could just magically flip a switch, throw up a tariff wall and magically create millions of new manufacturing jobs over night. But people need to stop repeating these ridiculous assertions about how US trade policy has no relationship to the decline in manufacturing employment.
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Mar 4, 2017 20:58
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Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
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Mar 4, 2017 23:52
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Ardennes posted:I notice a lot of "basic income is going to save us" going around. If there's one fairly persistent trend in the post 1970s world it seems to be an almost complete aversion or sense of disdain toward politics, and one manifestation of that trend is that people hope some narrow and specific policy can substitute for more profound or sweeping changes.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:30
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asdf32 posted:So again, if I take $1 from a rich person and give it to a poor person that's not wealth transfer how? Don't tell me it's only a dollar. You're assuming that the government that implements a basic income simultaneously raises a new tax of equivalent size.
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Apr 13, 2017 15:36
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asdf32 posted:Well I am assuming that tax increases would follow from UBI but it doesn't matter. The existing tax structure is already makes it so rich people pay more dollars. If the government writes out checks to everyone in equal values (the simplest form of UBI) it's majorly redistributive. That depends on whether the economy is already fully employing its available resources. If the government doesn't raise taxes and if the need to service the new demand of all those low-income UBI recipients by putting idle resources to work then the net result would be a boost to economic growth. For the UBI to have a re-distributive effect it would either have to be accompanied by a tax increase (as opposed to, say, trimming some fat out of the military budget or simply running up the deficit) or economy would have to be near enough to full employment already that the additional demand just inflates prices. For the record I would be in favour of government policies that redistribute income because I think the levels of inequality our society has reached are politically dangerous and economically inefficient, but it's worth pointing out that for the UBI to redistribute income you need to make several other assumptions.
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Apr 14, 2017 17:22
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:26 |
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The money could simply be printed by the government without raising any new taxes to "pay" for it. Unless the economy is already at or close to full employment this wouldn't automatically lead to inflation, it might simply cause idle resources to be put to work to service this increase in demand. Or you could eliminate anti-poverty and welfare programs and convert that money to an equivalent cash payment, which is something a number of conservative commentators have advocated for. The UBI has a strong potential to be re-distributive in nature (and I think that would be a strength and not a weakness) but it's not true by definition that it redistributes anything. It really depends on the larger context in which it is implemented and the exact manner in which it is designed. It's fallacious to think that there's a fixed supply of money that the US government has to tax away from the population first before it can spend on programs.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:27
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